Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate in general to systems and methods for navigating video content and, more specifically, to systems and methods for generating and using navigable spatial overviews for video.
Description of the Related Art
Video is notoriously difficult to navigate. The timeline is the standard video navigation control, linking the location of a cursor in a slider to a temporal position in a video. The abstraction the aforesaid navigation control provides is useful for many reasons, including that users are able to rapidly jump to different time points within the video and maintain an awareness of when in the video they currently are. However, for many how-to and instructional videos, knowing where the user is can be just as important. While there exist certain interfaces enabling users to navigate objects directly in a video, there are no solutions focused on abstractions that allow users to navigate a video spatially the same way they can use a timeline video control to navigate temporally.
Therefore, the conventional video navigation techniques are deficient due to the lack of spatial navigation solutions, as for many how-to and instructional videos, it would be more desirable for users to navigate video content using a spatial abstraction rather than a temporal abstraction (i.e., the standard timeline interface).